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Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

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Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#271

Post by RobMurray »

ddevault wrote: post #173
mwcampbell wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the days that you turn your monitor off, how do you do email? Do you also have a speech synthesis plugin for your aerc email client? Or do you use it with a generic screen reader for terminals? If the latter, which screen reader? I've found that, counter-intuitively, a fully accessible GUI program with a good GUI screen reader is easier to use than a screen-oriented terminal program with a screen reader. The troub…

>On the days that you turn your monitor off, how do you do email? Poorly. I want to improve aerc in this respect. For the time being, I use a mix of my braille reader (brltty) and piping emails into vipe so I can use my vim plugin to read them.

I would strongly recommend switching to Windows - the screen readers are just so much better than anything on Linux. I agree with the other person who said that GUI programs are easier to use with a screen reader. At least on windows, this is definitely the case.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#272

Post by 1337shadow »

bad_user wrote: post #265
27182818284 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar experience for when I taught myself the Dvorak layout years ago. My fingers learned the common motion for whole words first. Actually, I'm not sure I could draw the layout of the qwerty keyboard I'm typing on right now from memory either.

I never understood why Dvorak is a thing. I and others like me can touch type with Qwerty just fine. I can comfortably do 70-90 wpm, which is above my speed of thought. I don't suffer from RSI either and I've been touch typing for 20 years. Also the Qwerty layout is more international. In non-English languages the Dvorak assumptions break down, the layout being optimized for English. And good luck finding Dvorak vers…

I speak 3 languages on Dvorak-alt-intl layout which I have optimized for coding: https://blog.yourlabs.org/posts/2017-12-22-dvorak-intl-code-...

Dvorak fixed my RSI problems, it is not possible that Qwerty have the same physical impact than Dvorak because physically a Qwerty typer has to "walk" a lot more distance with their fingers to type the same thing than a Dvorak typer that has all voyels on the home row.

You can spot a Dvorak user by just watching them type: their fingers walk a lot less distance than other users. It's a trick that I learned from other Dvorak users who had spotted me.

I can still touch type with Qwerty, but my hands hurt after 5 minutes.

I type around 145 wpm, including in the 3 languages I speak (all ASCII based though) and languages or frameworks that I know by hearth.

To make it easy for colleges and friends, I just have 2 aliases:

alias aoeu="setxkbmap fr"

alias qsdf="setxkbmap -I ~/.xkb code -print | xkbcomp -I$HOME/.xkb - $DISPLAY"

As you can see, the four letters of the how row, in dvorak switches to french, in french switches to dvorak. Of course it could be more complicated with more layouts if I had to support them but then I guess a systray icon would work.

Anyway, also using Kinesis Advantage 2 LF, absolutely love it, and plenty of other "non-standard" stuff like the OP says, such as a tiling window manager.

Highly recommend learning or making a better layout than Qwerty because the drawbacks are largely country balanced by the benefits IMHO.

It's not about whatever someone thinks is "standard" it's about how you want to touch the machine for the rest of your life.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#273

Post by renaulth »

kolanos wrote: post #47

You can definitely continue as a software engineer. I'm living proof. It won't be easy, especially at first. For a while it will feel like you're working twice as hard just to keep up with your sighted peers. But eventually, the better you get with your tools, you'll find you have some superpowers over your sighted peers. For example, as you get better with a screen reader, you'll be bumping the speech rate up to 1.7…

Hi, I am in a similar boat, I still have sufficient vision to code without a screen reader, but my concern has always been about the non-programming tasks that any modern developer is faced with on a daily basis.

In my job I typically spend 3-4 hours a day in the IDE, but but rest of the day is spent looking at production issues and servers, looking at RabbitMQ management UI, etc. The emphasis being on "looking".

I'm just curious as to how a screen reader would allow you to do those things, in a high pressure environment?

Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#274

Post by isidorn »

Hi,

My name is Isidor and I work on VS Code. Here's some hopefully useful advice:

* Join a screen reader mailing list and get to know the commnity: Program-L is the name of the general list and there is one list for Orca Screen Reader in case you are a Linux user

We try hard to make VS Code accessible so in case you decide to use VS Code:

* We have a gitter channel for accessibility which you can join https://gitter.im/Microsoft/vscode-a11y

* You can file issues and provide feedback as we try to improve continously https://github.com/microsoft/vscode

* Feel free to ping me @isidorn on either of those or on Twitter. And let me know if we can help more.

I wish you all the best

Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#275

Post by baseonmars »

hnick wrote: post #122
Marsymars wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI that process is called "subvocalization" - I'm only passingly familiar, but if you search that term there's lots of literature about it.

Yes that's the one, I forgot what it was called. Always found this part interesting (from the wiki): "This inner speech is characterized by minuscule movements in the larynx and other muscles involved in the articulation of speech. Most of these movements are undetectable (without the aid of machines) by the person who is reading."

Try gently pressing your finger against your larynx when you read in your head - you'll likely find you read faster - this works for me, although I tend not to bother.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#276

Post by tibbydudeza »

I have a colleague who has RP (Retinitis pigmentosa).

He is a SAP front end developer and uses normal laptop/ keyboard running Windows 10 with the addition of a screen reader called Jaws and an IPhone.

He lives close to work and lives on his own and walks to the office unassisted or uses uber further out ... the only issue is when there is a crowd and then we help him get to the canteen for example.

Obviously his audio acuity is way above the norm , his screen reader is probably set at over 300 words per minute.

Also another thing is we make sure the office layout remains the same as he has memorized the layout.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#277

Post by taigi100 »

One small detail: when your hearing will get worst you'll probably have to have a cochlear implant. The newer models have a "neat" trick where you can connect them to your phone / pc by using bluetooth so they can act like sort of headphones. Keep your head up and keep walking the path, you can do it!

Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#278

Post by avip »

WalterBright wrote: post #250
egd wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a previous gig, we had a lot of systems named after animals, and I'd joked about wiring our alerting system up to emit the animal sound for the system that was paging, but I think I'm actually going to do that at my next gig. Outside the land of software, engineers debug systems using sound all the time - I think we're underutilizing our senses and our pattern recognition.

I always wonder at the madness of elevator design. Most of them "ping" as they pass a floor for accessibility. But that means the blind rider must first know the floor he is on, then count the pings to the right floor. It should simply announce each floor as it passes. I know from experience that you can make quite comprehensible voice sounds by connecting a 5V I/O pin to a speaker, so there is no excuse. (All you do…

Any modestly "modern" elevator would have Braille indicators. And many also announce floors same way public transit does.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#279

Post by lozf »

kendallpark wrote: post #190
vidanay wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment about proof reading and errors not sounding right reminds me of the "proper/best" way to learn Morse code for ham radio. Most everyone is familiar with the charts that show A=.- B=-... etc. Lots of beginners try to actually interpret the sounds in their ears and convert that to a letter and then convert a bunch of those to a word. Obviously, that is very processor intensive and has a high failure rate. T…

A while back I worked for a team that had wired up Jenkins to a speaker in the office. Each type of event would trigger a different Zelda sound effect. Victory music for successful deployments, game over music for breaking the build, etc. Notably, dev server exceptions were connected to sword clashing sounds. It led to debugging situations like this: "Okay, so that's two clanks when we click on this button, but if we…

That concept reminds me of "Peep - the network auralizer."

- https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...

- http://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html

Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#280

Post by WalterBright »

avip wrote: post #278
WalterBright wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder at the madness of elevator design. Most of them "ping" as they pass a floor for accessibility. But that means the blind rider must first know the floor he is on, then count the pings to the right floor. It should simply announce each floor as it passes. I know from experience that you can make quite comprehensible voice sounds by connecting a 5V I/O pin to a speaker, so there is no excuse. (All you do…

Any modestly "modern" elevator would have Braille indicators. And many also announce floors same way public transit does.

I've never been in an elevator that announced the floors with anything better than a ping. This is despite elevators being controlled by single board computers since around 1980.

The buttons have had braille on them for a long time.

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